Subject: When Thoth and I talked about this last night
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Posted on: 2022-06-06 14:46:11 UTC

One theory I had for why they had both <i> and <em> is to handle the case where emphasis doesn't necessarily mean italics in the format the page is being viewed in. For example, if the webpage were being viewed on something that acts like a typewriter, you as the author may want to make a distinction between "this next is italicized, go get the italic font" and "this is emphasized, and while that means italics if you can and feel bothered, I won't complain much if you underline it instead"

That's not really a relevant usecase today, but it probably was when HTML was being designed, so that's my speculation about where these weird duplicate tags come from.

(And in theory the typewriter-like usecase isn't dead ... Braille displays exist, for example)

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